Five accessibility bugs worth a ticket today
Most audit findings are noise you can schedule. These five are not, and fixing them now saves the retrofit every team postpones for a quarter.
An audit will hand you ninety findings. Perhaps six of them stop somebody using the site. These are the five that show up most often in that six.
- A focus style removed with
outline: noneand never replaced. Keyboard users are now navigating blind. - An icon-only button with no accessible name, so a screen reader announces it as “button”.
- A modal that does not trap focus, letting Tab wander behind the overlay into a page nobody can see.
- Form errors announced only in colour, so anybody who cannot see red does not know which field failed.
- A skip link that exists but is
display: none, which removes it from the accessibility tree entirely.
Test with the keyboard before the audit
Ten minutes of Tab, Enter and Escape on your main flow finds more real problems than a full automated scan, and you can do it today.
Key takeaways
- Never remove a focus style without adding one back.
- Every icon-only control needs a name a screen reader can read.
- Never signal an error with colour alone.
Comments
1The hidden skip link is the one we shipped for two years without noticing. Clipping it instead of hiding it was a one-line fix.